


Research Purposes

by LokiOfSassgaard



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-28 21:26:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6345985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LokiOfSassgaard/pseuds/LokiOfSassgaard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock gets curious about the concept of sex. Set sometime during his university years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Research Purposes

It wasn’t that he didn’t understand. In fact, Sherlock understood perfectly well why Sebastian would have girls over to the flat. He had girls over, or would go over to theirs for sex. It was a simple explanation that anyone would have seen.

Sherlock understood this, but he didn’t comprehend it.

The what of the situation was simple, crystal clear, and in plain sight. The why of the situation was one that Sherlock had tried and utterly failed to quantify time and time again. He tried to assess the situation without actually thinking about whatever Sebastian was getting up to, but his brain would inevitably supply images that would make his stomach churn. To distract himself from the repulsive mental images, Sherlock would launch into an all out aural assault on the entire flat with his violin, often playing non-stop for hours at a time.

He had a girlfriend, although the definition of the term was not as most people used it. She was a friend, who happened to be female, and who seemed to enjoy his company. She was two years above him, studying politics, and one of the most brilliant people Sherlock had met. Sherlock found most students boring and tedious, but Carol was the first person close to his age that he could have a conversation with, and not be called names or expect to be punched in the face.

They were sitting on the floor in Sherlock’s sitting room, each doing one another’s coursework (an interesting challenge for both of them, since they weren’t studying the same thing), when Sebastian barged in with a girl hanging off his arms. Sherlock watched as Sebastian took his date to his room, their giggles and shuffling around audible from behind the closed door.

“What was that?” Carol asked, sounding almost amused.

Sherlock tore his attention from Sebastian’s door. “What was what?”

“That noise you made,” Carol said. “You sounded repulsed at them.”

“Aren’t you?”

The look on Carol’s face suggested otherwise. She seemed torn between finding something terribly funny, and waiting for the punch line of some unrelated joke. Sherlock took this as a cue to get up and move to the other side of the room.

“Music,” he declared.

The stereo had been Sebastian’s, but Sherlock had long since taken over the sitting room as his area, and the stereo apparently came with the acquired territory. He indiscriminately chose a CD and dropped it into the tray, closing it with a light flourish. He kept expecting Carol to tell him that what Sebastian and his current flavour of the week were getting up to was completely natural, and how everybody does it, and found himself rather relieved and surprised when she never did.

“Well, go on,” he said as he sat back down on the rug. “I know you want to ask.”

“What?” asked Carol. “It’s perfectly normal.”

Here it was. She’d just been being po lite about it, not wanting to ask until she knew it was okay. Sherlock almost felt disappointed in her for it.

“Some people just aren’t into it,” she continued. “Nothing wrong with that.”

Sherlock’s well-rehearsed speech, still on the edge of his mouth, blocked anything else he might have said. He must have been making a face, because Carol laughed at him.

“What were you expecting me to say?” she asked, closing Sherlock’s textbook and sliding it aside. This was far more important and interesting than his chemistry assignment.

“To get over myself and stop being such a freak,” he said honestly. “That’s what everybody else says.”

They both laughed at that, because it was such an utterly ridiculous thing for him to say.

“Have you ever snogged anybody?”

Her tone was curious, rather than filled with the scathing incredulity he was used to, and for the first time, he didn’t want to lash out and smack someth ing rather than answer. Instead he just shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Well, there was a girl in primary school, but we were six years old, and had been dared. I don’t think that counts.”

Carol laughed, and for a terrifying moment, Sherlock expected her to ask if he wanted to try it. When she reached back for his chemistry textbook instead, Sherlock had decided that she was, beyond doubt, the best person he had ever met.

 

To most people, Sherlock came off as cold and emotionless. There was a short time, when accused of this to his face, when he would try to explain that he could feel emotions. Beyond just being happy or sad, he knew that he was capable of feeling, and even expressing a wide range of emotions, some more intensely than most people. The main difference, he would go on, was that even though he could feel these emotions, he simply didn’t care about anybody enough to direct these emotions at anyone else but himself.

Eve ntually, he got bored of people calling him a freak, and even stopped caring about what they thought of him. Clearly, they didn’t care about him, as evidenced in how little they actually paid attention to what he said, so why should he care about them?

He was fairly certain, however, that he had never experienced anything like romantic love. That there were different degrees of love, he knew for certain. Sherlock certainly loved trying to figure problems out, unravelling the little strings and pulling them apart until he could see every individual piece. He had a certain fondness for Van Morrison, which he supposed to be called love to some extent, and when he was a boy, he adored the family cat. But he could not ever recall ever experiencing this emotion in a truly visceral sense, as when directed at another person.

For about two hours, he thought he might feel this way about Carol, but the more he thought about it and analysed the situation, the more he came to suspect that this was not the case. If anything, he realised, he was confused. What he felt was need, which – as far as he could tell – felt a bit like love. Or, at least what he had come to imagine what love must feel like. The need he felt was nothing carnal or physical, but more to do with needing to feel welcome in an environment where he could be himself. She was one of the very few people he did care about, and that was important to him. She provided companionship in a way that was different from a cat or a family member.

Accepting this explanation as something he could be comfortable with, he pushed the whole thing away from his mind and went to go fetch a large frog he had put in the fridge several days earlier.

 

One of Carol’s favourite things to do had been to paint Sherlock’s toenails. Sherlock didn’t mind this, since he did rather like the focus on himself, and it wasn’t like anyone outside of the flat would ever see him without shoes on, anyway.

Sherlock lay stretched out on the sofa with his feet in her lap as he read a medical journal. There hadn’t been anything particularly interesting in it, which was just as well because he was hardly paying attention, anyway. He was far too relaxed to properly focus on anything, and had even managed to ignore Sebastian’s less-than-witty insult as he left the flat to do who cared what.

“What do you think?” Carol asked eventually.

Sherlock dropped the journal onto his chest to see the result of her effort, and was startled at the violent shade of green she had decided on.

“What’s that one called?” he asked.

“Fallout Green.” She screwed the cap back on the small bottle and dropped it into her handbag.

Sherlock looked at the colour for a long moment, his head tilted slightly to one side. “I’d say that’s an appropriate name, yes. Would you put this in the video?”

Carol had known Sherlock long eno ugh to not even flinch at his sudden subject change, and took the tape he had pulled out of the sofa cushions. It didn’t have a case, and the label that had once identified it had been messily scraped off.

“What is it?” she asked, turning it over in her hands.

“I stole it from Sebastian’s room last night when he wasn’t looking,” Sherlock explained. “It’s one of the ones from his sock drawer.”

He lifted his feet up from her lap so that she could get up.

“Are you sure?” Carol asked cautiously. She wasn’t asking about the location of the tape, and Sherlock knew it.

“Yes,” he said simply. “I’ve never watched one before. I’m curious.”

He watched her as she got to her feet and queued up the video. It had already be rewound, since Sebastian took care of that after he’d last watched it – so that he didn’t have to wait the next time he wanted to, no doubt.

Sherlock moved to sit upright, drawing his knees up under his chin and focusing on the telly as though he were about to watch something for research purposes. At its most basic, that’s exactly what he was doing, though. He wanted to see how he might react to watching someone perform a sexual act.

He hadn’t expected for the film to actually have a plot, vague and contrived as it was, and he groaned loudly at the lead’s complete inability to act. She had clearly been cast for her fake breasts and small waistline.

“Do people actual behave like this?” Sherlock asked when the lead started coming on quite strongly to the auto mechanic she’d taken her car to.

“Haven’t you ever had anyone come on to you before?” Carol asked from beside him.

Sherlock just groaned again, and Carol tried not to laugh.

When the actors’ clothes came off, Sherlock did notice that he did not feel as nauseated or repulsed as he’d expected to, although there was some level of discomfort, deep in his chest. This was not something he should be watching. But he kept his eyes on the telly, his head tilted slightly to one side, spending a few moments at a time focusing on different parts of the screen.

“And watching this is supposed to make me want to have sex?” Sherlock asked after several minutes.

“For most people, yeah,” Carol said.

Sherlock wondered faintly if he should feel embarrassed about this conversation, but he couldn’t think of any logical reason why. He quickly dismissed the idea.

“You?” he asked.

Carol smiled. “Watch your film,” she said.

Sherlock did find himself wondering if maybe he should have embarked upon this little experiment on his own. While he did trust Carol not to make a pass at him, or whatever the insipid slang was, he was acutely aware that the film probably was doing something for Carol, whatever that something was meant to be. He considered briefly moving to the far end of the sofa, or pos sibly onto the floor, but he forced himself to stay put. He was relatively certain that even if she was aroused by this fairly undignified display, she had brain in her head and the sense to know what she was doing. He did realise that this notion was badly flawed, since everybody had a brain in their head and few people ever seemed to know what they were doing, but he ignored this bit for now.

He catalogued all of this information somewhere in his mind for later, when he’d have a chance to go back over it all and properly analyse everything. But for now, he just sat quietly and watched. He found it to be rather repetitive and boring, since there wasn’t a whole lot going on. Just a lot of frantic hip wiggling and loud moaning.

Things did take a rather unexpected turn when the mechanic decided he’d rather finish himself off, and sprayed ejaculate on the actress’ face. Sherlock barked in disgust, and covered his mouth.

“What was the point of that ?” he asked the room in general.

“Domination,” answered Carol in a clinical tone. “It’s supposed to make the man feel important.”

“If that’s what normal people do to feel important, I think I’m quite happy being a freak, thanks,” Sherlock declared.

He toyed with the remote control for a moment before ejecting the tape. He felt a strange desire to completely tear the tape apart and leave the whole mangled mess on the end of Sebastian’s bed for him to find, but realised that it wouldn’t actually accomplish anything.

He’d probably just tear it apart and leave the pieces wherever they happened to fall.

“Sebastian has some other ‘films’ in his bedroom, but he keeps moving them,” Sherlock declared as he jumped to his feet, carelessly tossing the remote aside.

“Why doesn’t he keep them where you found this one?” asked Carol, getting up to follow after him.

“Because he’s ashamed of them.” He said this with a certain sort of glee.

“Oh. I see,” Carol said. Sherlock could tell from her tone that she did.

“That’s why the labels are all torn off,” Sherlock explained, leading the way into Sebastian’s bedroom and flicking on the light. “I found them a few months ago while I was trying to find a biro.”

Carol knew that her friend had issues with his flatmate, though she had never been able to figure what those issues actually were. The fact that she’d seen the way Sebastian would yell sometimes when he came home made her slightly more willing to start digging through the man’s stuff, though. While Sherlock looked through the wardrobe, Carol got down to her hands and knees and started feeling under the bed.

“How many are we looking for?” she asked.

“Two,” said Sherlock as he opened a shoebox. It had shoes in it, so he tossed it back to the bottom of the wardrobe.

“These two?”

Sherlock turned to see her holding up two more tapes with the labels torn off, and grinned widely.

“Yes,” he declared. “Bring them both, though I’m not sure if we’ll get through them.”

He had a vague sort of idea as to the content of these particular films, and wanted to see if they were any different from the first one, aside from the sexual organs involved. He let himself fall back onto the sofa, getting comfortable while Carol switched out the tapes.

“Would you like some popcorn?” she asked, making her way toward the kitchen.

“It’s Tuesday,” Sherlock said by way of an answer.

Not sure what that was supposed to mean, she made some anyway.

 

By the time Sebastian returned home, Carol had left. Sherlock had switched out the first tape for the second one, although the telly had now been on mute. Playing over the pornographic display on the telly was Van Morrison’s Moondance album (not his favourite, but Astral Week did n’t have the right subject matter for his purposes), with the title track on single repeat. Sherlock was positive that the lines in the song were not describing what the images in Sebastian’s porn were trying to imply. The conclusion he’d reached from this was that romantic attachment and sexual attraction were not strictly mutually inclusive. It was, Sherlock had determined after analysing each song on the album and the three videos nicked from Sebastian’s room, entirely possible to have one without the other, although it seemed to be the expected norm for both to be present in a successful relationship.

Lying on the floor in the midst of destroyed video cassette was Sherlock, stretched out on his back and idly plucking the strings of his violin as he stared vacantly up at the ceiling.

“Shut up, I’m thinking,” said Sherlock before Sebastian was able to even take everything in.

“What the bloody hell are you playing at?” Sebastian demanded.

“I said shut up,” Sherlock said.

Sebastian stomped toward his bedroom and howled in rage, at what Sherlock interpreted to be the sight of the state of his wardrobe. He let himself smile at this.

“You’re moving out,” declared Sebastian as he stomped back into the sitting room.

“Am I?” asked Sherlock. The only move he made was to reach for his bow.

“Yes.” He started to make his way to Sherlock’s bedroom, presumably to start packing for him, but stopped when he saw what was actually being played on the telly. “Is that—”

“I borrowed them for research purposes,” Sherlock said. “Results were inconclusive with only one subject, so I had to pick a variety.”

“You’re researching porn?” Sebastian asked incredulously.

Sherlock twisted on the floor to look Sebastian in the eye. “Yes,” he said simply. “If you plan on standing there, you might as well help me.”

He pointed his bow at the t elevision, where two men were doing something fairly acrobatic in a kitchen. “How does your arousal from this film differ from the one you kept in your sock drawer?”

Sebastian’s face turned red as he failed to find the right words to express what was almost certainly abject mortification. Instead, he turned quickly and stomped out of the flat, slamming the door behind him. The next morning, he sent someone else round to gather his things.

Sherlock didn’t see him again for another twelve years.


End file.
